Confusion
by heroictype
Summary: When a certain former duck discovers that she is soon to have a child, the father seems to be the most flustered.


Another one from those now-ancient livejournal requests... I still want to do them, hopefully the people are still around to see. Anyway, making progress as best as possible!

One day I will not be so painfully slow.

The request for this one was that Duck finds out she's pregnant, but the question arises: will it be a human child, or an egg?

Princess Tutu and all its characters belong to Itoh Ikuko.

* * *

><p>Though it was a young lady who breezed gracefully into the study with delicate waves of red swishing at her back, like the remnants of a braid she had not worn for years, there was something decidedly childish about the way she flinched when the door squeaked open and drew the attention of the man at the desk. He set down his pen and shifted in his chair to face her, unsmiling as expected. In a way, she found that comforting, but it did nothing to still the fidgeting of her fingers over her stomach.<p>

She couldn't hesitate about this. Except she was already doing exactly that, standing there, staring, trying to gather up enough will to pry out words and becoming mired in the attempt.

"...Is something _wrong_?"

"No, nothing!"

Oh, right. Fakir was there. She'd almost forgotten about him, even though he was really the point of this; maybe she should have waited, taken some more time to figure out just what the right way to say this was, something delicate. Something verbal seemed like a good place to start. At least she hadn't lied to him. Nothing was wrong; this was going to be a good thing. She was sure of that.

But for something so important, she needed to think about it. Despite the fact that she was the one who'd come in too early, she couldn't suppress a desire for him to be patient.

He stared at her for a moment long enough to go from agonizing to merely numbing. "Then why aren't you breathing?"

Her gasp had nothing to do with letting go of her breath; it wasn't as though she'd actually been holding it, anyway. She gathered herself, her lips pursed stubbornly as words flashed from them. "This is important! Why don't you just-" She cut herself off with a faintly frantic huff. "I... we're... Fakir..."

"You aren't making sense," he informed her, blunt even in his faint exasperation. His eyes examined her doubtfully from across the room, clearly still believing there was some problem he could fix for her. He seemed to have been trying to decode her stammering to find the less frazzled message beneath, but then, he wasn't sure whether or not that _existed_, so he simply refrained from further remarks. She could say what she wanted to.

The expectation drifted aimlessly, ready for her to act on it, and she knew she would have to. Not eventually, now. And really, it wasn't bad, it just stuck in her throat like gobs of peanut butter. Nice, but difficult to manage; that was all, but it was a lot more- This wasn't working. She took a deep breath around it. In, but not out. In place of exhaling, she set free a fluttering jumble of speech, in the fastest and least intelligible manner possible. "Well, I'm going to have a child... and it's your child, too, so... you know..."

Fakir's mouth might have dropped open, but it sealed itself into a taut line again so quickly that she couldn't have been sure. Though she didn't lose ground before him, she wondered in a flare of anxiety if she had startled the ability to smile out of him forever. She forced herself to challenge that coldly set expression; but for all his sourness and the electric spark that flared in the back of her widened blue eyes, the shared reaction of their blood gave them away as it sped to stain both their faces a flustered shade of pink.

"So, what now?" His brow furrowed crossly, but for all that his eyes had been forced into slits, she still caught a dark flickering. Accusation, or the possibility of it, though she wasn't sure of what. She wondered with a jolt if he really expected her to know _how_ and _where_ and _when_. And she did not. She stammered as much.

"I don't know! I mean-"

"You don't know. _Of course_, you don't." His inquiry was tight, but not in any particularly controlled way, and it only drew irritation from her. "Do you even know if you're going to lay an egg, or... have a child?"

"How should I know?" She snapped right back at him, tilting her head away from him in a huff. "You're the one who made me a human, and- You did make me a human, right? I mean... didn't you...?"

As the tense heat of the moment dissipated, she seemed to become increasingly concerned. He started at her blankly, but his frown only grew sharper. "Yes, I did. I wasn't... being serious..."

"But... I mean, that's not possible, is it? Me laying an egg... I don't think so, but I want you to have good child..." She trailed off, sheepish and blushing again. Even if he was going to be mean about it, well, what else did she expect from him? She didn't really think he would be upset, after he had time to think about it; if she thought he was that kind of person, she wouldn't have been in this situation at all.

"Well, it's not like it matters," he told her bluntly. He didn't know any other way to express himself when he was flustered, but she flinched, and he almost just forced himself to be quiet. He had not been being serious, and he had not even spoken out of anger. Just shock. She shouldn't have taken what he said so directly, and that everything else he was saying made it worse was not making it any easier for him. In the end, though, he muttered sourly, "...Even if it was a duck, it would still be our child. So it doesn't matter."

Her silence was complete, so much so that he had not expected her to move, and he was ultimately defenseless as she sprang smoothly at him. She was graceful enough now to avoid tripping, and fix her arms around him without incident. Without having to think about it, he returned her hold, relieved to hear her laugh into his ear.

"I guess that's right. We _would_ have the cutest duckling, wouldn't we?"


End file.
